"I was always scared that I'd see my name and then scroll to see what they're saying," Jeter recalls in a new cover interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "And I didn't want to deal with that when I was playing. I'd tell my family and friends, 'If you read something or hear something, don't tell me about it.' I didn't want to read negativity."

Throughout his career, Jeter has always tried to maintain a strong sense of privacy.

"I always knew that my job was to limit distractions for my team and not cause headlines," he added. "So I kept a lot of things to myself."

Once shunning the media, Jeter is now embracing it with his new website, The Players' Tribune (TPT).

When the site launched in October, The New York Times speculated that this was Jeter's chance to become more "chatty," to which he strongly denies.

"Yeah, I'm so chatty," laughed Jeter, who has only posted a few publisher's letters. "Their reaction was, I never said anything for 20 years and now all of a sudden I was going to be telling my whole life story. But this was not built for me. It was built for the athletes."

But, Jeter adds, "I've never said that we're trying to eliminate the media. We're not covering day-to-day sports scores. We don't have sports highlights. This is completely different. We're starting the conversation. I think we can coexist."